Category: Culture

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Emerging on a New World, Part Four: Remaking Culture?

I graduated high school in 1968. What a great year—for race riots, assassinations, war protests and burning buildings! None of it affected me directly, as I was working my first summer job and realizing I absolutely hated the 8-to-5 routine. (Just like school! What was the point?) In other words, like most 18-year-olds I was totally self-focused. Things seemed pretty bad out there, but they were still out there. Had I a boyfriend who’d just received his draft notice I would have felt differently, but boyfriends of any kind were still in my future.

I doubt the perspective of 18-year-olds has changed much since then, but current events have leaned hard on them. These “uncertain times,” for the first time I can remember, have affected literally everyone. The late sixties and seventies were awful, but I was busy getting married and having babies and didn’t notice so much. 2020 may actually signal a profound turning point in a long process of coming apart (in the Charles-Murray sense).

Who’s in charge here? Nobody.

Never have officeholders seemed more hapless. Never has magical thinking been so pronounced. Never has a culture so obsessed over anecdotes while broad-based problems go begging for attention. Definitions are so blurred and signals so crossed that vandals burning property owned by blacks is excused in the cause of justice for blacks. Are we doomed?

Nah. This is America, in the best way. Our national superpower is initiative, and I don’t think we’ve lost it. It’s true that the academic left would do everything in their power to tar-brush our history and remake our character, but the academic left is not invincible. Polarization is as intense as it ever was—except for that situation in 1861, which was a little worse—and that’s not good. But neither is it hopeless.

I’ve been rereading Andy Crouch’s Culture Making, and here’s one thing, among a lot of things, that stands out: “I have become convinced that little good comes from straining to ‘change the culture.’” That’s a misunderstanding of what culture is and who we are. Whole books could be written about what culture is (and Crouch wrote one), but we can all understand who we are as a function of our community: family, neighborhood, church, club, or organization. And community is where we don’t change culture, but make it.

Volunteers who come together to sweep up broken glass are a community, quickly formed and just as quickly dissolved when the job is done.  But to get out there and make some culture requires something a little more deliberate, and I found Crouch’s subsection on “The 3, the 12, and the 120” especially helpful.

Every movement begins with a small group—perhaps just two or four, but three is the perfect number. Each individual springboards off the others, and three is just right for hatching an idea that’s feasible as well as inspiring. To carry it out, however, requires a larger group. Could be 8 or 13, but 12 has a nice historical—or at least biblical–vibe to it. The 12 provide essential support within a circle that pulls in many talents and skill sets. Then, as the circle widens, it draws in more people as accessories: say, 120. The 120 are not the core; mostly likely they will be involved in several other projects, as well as focusing on their own, but they form a kind of phalanx to extend the original idea, now refined to a cultural product, onto a broader platform—that is, into “the culture” at large.

As I read this I found myself thinking of Christ’s ministry, and sure enough: he began with his “3”—his inner group of apostles, or even the original Trinity. His “12” were the apostles who spent almost every waking moment with him throughout his ministry. But to launch that ministry into the world took the 120 believers who were praying in an upper room on Pentecost.

But the same pattern can hold for any new cultural good. Publishing a book, for instance. Andy Crouch explains that his “3” were his wife and a good friend, who sounded his ideas for Culture Making and supplied inspiration for further thoughts. Then his publishing team, the “12,” pitched in to make the book a reality: editors, designers, and marketer. To get the book off the ground took a platoon of bloggers, pastors, reviewers, and interviews, so that eventually Culture Making got to me and stimulated my thinking to look for my niche and my 3. Everyone makes culture; intentionally or not. Everyone has their potential 3 and 12, and perhaps even their 120. And everyone has power: the question is, how much, and what do we do with it?

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Emerging on a New World, Part Three: Magical Dysfunction

I review a lot of children’s books for a website called Redeemed Reader. A common theme in children’s fantasy is “magic” as a lost element in a disenchanted world. The protagonist is born with some supernatural gift or sensitivity that no one appreciates, but once presented with a problem he (or she) forges fearfully ahead and discovers calling, power, and purpose. The plot unfolds against a background of skepticism or outright hostility. In the Harry Potter series, muggles provide the contrast to magic, who are often irritating but generally harmless.

In Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials series, the Magisterium, a cartoony stand-in for organized religion, play the villains. I just read a delightful children’s fantasy that followed the Pullman plotline closely (but less dogmatically), complete with a monk-like order of naysayers intent on stomping out all witchery and wizardry.

I’m also seeing a lot of magical realism, where supernatural events occur in a real time and place, among characters with quirky names and personalities. The magic in these stories doesn’t have a source; it’s just there, or it’s somehow passed down through families, coming to rest upon an unassuming protagonist. A common element in all these books is the need to believe—in yourself, in your abilities, and especially in the “magic.”

I’m not sure what the increase in fantasy and magical realism for middle-schoolers tells us, except perhaps that when God goes out the door, magic creeps down the chimney. We have our supernatural yearnings, and need our supernatural fix.

Magic is one thing in literature; another thing in public policy. Some of the most ideological politicians like to claim science as their guide, as though “science” were a magic word. And in a way, it is. “The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins,” wrote C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man: “one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse”—that being, to control nature and bend reality.

That Hideous Strength, Lewis’ fictional exposition of The Abolition of Man, pictures Science going full circle and merging with Magic in order to remake humanity. In his 1945 review of the novel, George Orwell approved the premise of THS, but “On the whole, novels are better when there are no miracles in them.”

Still . . . when God goes out the door, the supernatural creeps down the chimney. In the secular public square, life can’t be seen as a gift, because gifts imply givers. Life is therefore more of a problem, or series of problems, to be solved with facts and stats repeated like incantations. Capital-S Science becomes a religion–even a Magisterium–and imagination retreats into fantasy, e.g., children’s literature and the Marvel universe, offering hope that the world really is a fantastic place and there’s a little magic in all of us.

And you know what? It’s true. “Organized religion,” in the form of Christian doctrine, tells us that the world is fantastic, and humans are spiritual beings as well as physical. But since public policy can’t acknowledge that in any meaningful way, suppressed spirituality comes out in magical thinking via “science,” all the more as it drifts away from traditional forms of religion. In That Hideous Strength, every nation has its own spiritual genius—its “magic,” you might say, that defines its place in the world and calls it back to its truest self. Our truest self combines initiative and altruism in a dynamic that self-corrects as it progresses: at its best, something like the abolitionist movement. At its worst, Karenism.

That’s why, in the United States, I can’t see us either buying in to a massive socialist restructuring, or going back to small-government federalism. We keep drifting leftward while our peculiar American genius pulls us back, so that we’re stuck mid-stream. The pressure of the current will keep tugging our freedoms away, but even as that happens, our resistance may grow deeper roots.

No political solution will work very well. We’re seeing that already, with a patchwork of openings and closings, conflicting data, escalating anger, and a looming election that looks more like a bloodbath. When the smoke clears, I doubt anyone will be happy. This state of affairs will not be fixable by science or magic. But if we can’t fix it, I think there’s a way to navigate it, by a combination of practical thinking and spiritual muscle. And that’s a topic for next week.

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Emerging on a New World, Part Two: Nobody Knows Nothin’

When I was a budding novelist, I quickly learned that the publishing world didn’t care about my aspirational goals. I had to conform to the publisher, not vice versa. As many positive thoughts I lavished on my first novel, it never saw print because it wasn’t very good.

Eventually I learned, over the 20-year process of writing three more unpublished novels, how to write fiction. It’s true that I probably wouldn’t have learned if I hadn’t believed in raw talent worth developing. Positive thinking, while it bridged no gaps, at least provided a landing platform. But between the dream and the realization was a long stretch of hard work.

For some time now, I’ve had the feeling that our political class is marked, not by positive thinking, but by magical thinking. Psychologically, “Magical thinking” is defined as the belief that one’s personal thoughts, fears, and goals influence the outside world. Young children indulge in magical thinking all the time: a child who prays every night that his parents will stop fighting, for example, could feel he’s to blame when Mom and Dad stop the fights by splitting up. It’s normal for kids, but a grownup who indulges in such fantasies is called a schizophrenic. Or a politician.

You remember when Barak Obama, after winning the Democrat presidential nomination, inspired his followers with rhetoric about the day the oceans stopped rising. Or Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention: “I alone can fix.” Trump at least had actually built things with steel and concrete, while Obama had built nothing but his own persona. But both were overpromising based on a magical (or at least inflated) view of themselves in the world.

During the Democratic debates Elizabeth Warren brought the hammer down on mild suggestions that there was no need to overhaul the entire health care system. You gotta Dream Big! If she ever got the chance to enact her Day-One agenda, “Big” would have included cancelling the constitution as Step One, since much of what she wanted to do was clearly outside its parameters. Elaborate promises are nothing new in political campaigns, but the size and scope of this year’s Democrat vision is breathtaking. Bernie Sanders, likewise, seemed to think he could materialize his socialist dream by yelling about it.

DreamBig: the Next Generation is even farther out in the galaxy. Got Climate Change? Let’s just re-structure our entire civilization. We won WWII, didn’t we?

“If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it,” said everybody from Mohammed Ali to your kindergarten teacher. They never add that somewhere between Believe and Achieve is a lot of stuff: planning, coordinating, hard work, setbacks, tedium, failures, and thousands of details. Since we don’t dream in details, the gaps between here and there are too readily filled with know-nothing thought. And that leads to last-minute sloppiness and long-term incompetence, like the Obamacare website rollout and Iowa Caucus 2020.

A habit of magical thinking is extremely dangerous when a real crisis spills out like an escaped virus from a lab. Too much of the political class (I’m naming no names) has outsourced its brain to chosen experts and crossed its fingers and wished upon a vaccine that “the Economy” (whose breadth and complexity they never came close to grasping) will somehow survive long enough to a) snap back to its former glory, or b) surrender to a total makeover. It’s not likely that either of those things will happen. More likely is a dysfunctional hybrid. What can we do with that? I’m still thinking.

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Emerging on a New World, Part One: Doomsday Is Imminent (again)

My husband was raising the alarm early in the 1990s. Even wrote a booklet about it, which he distributed to friends and family. Our government was overspending—there was a hockey-stick graph that showed the federal budget shooting up in the stratosphere (a billion-dollar deficit!!), with certain consequences for the near future. We were in our forties at the time, and did not expect to collect our Social Security. Black Monday, when the Dow dropped by 22% in one day (10/22/87) was just the beginning: once the bond market collapsed, we’d be plunged into another Great Depression. We would have to start saving now: even stock up on commodities like paper products and imperishable food staples. So we built columns of toilet paper until we ran out of room and lost interest. Because nothing happened.

Around 1997, rumors about Y2K began. This would be an unprecedented catastrophe—payback for the hubris of linking the whole world in a network of 1’s and 0’s. Once every electronic clock in the world rolled over to 2-0-0-0 our mainframes would lose their collective minds and crash into incoherence, with planes falling out of the sky and money frozen in cyberspace, life-support machines malfunctioning and millions starving. It sounds crazy now, but I knew dozens of computer-savvy people who took it very seriously, to the point of moving to the country and storing up flour and ammo (like we did). Needless to say, the clock rolled over and nothing happened.

But the damage was done; everybody was hooked up to the internet now, and Doomsday predictions popped out blatting alarms with the regularity of wooden figures on a cuckoo clock. On the left it was Mother Earth crying for help as she was alternatively parched and flooded. On the right it was deep state, Illuminati, global currency reset causing massive social upheaval, stolen elections, martial law. Depending on which newsletter you subscribed to, the powers-that-be would make their big move THIS MONTH or BY THE END OF THE YEAR or SOON. And then, brothers and sisters, hang on, because it’s going to be a rough ride.

So . . . you think maybe it finally happened? Not with a bang, but a whimper?

As good as the postwar modern age has been to us westerners, with its abundant food and comforts and diversions, we seem addicted to unease. It’s almost as though we’re worried about having it too good. Not that there weren’t reasons for alarm. When I was a kid, the US and USSR apparently came very close to a nuclear showdown over Cuba. When I was in high school and college, two major assassinations and colleges literally on fire. In the 70s, a huge presidential scandal, double-digit inflation, an oil embargo, a general sense of “malaise.” That’s about when Paul Simon wrote

I don’t know a soul that’s not been battered; I don’t have a friend who feels at ease.

I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered or driven to its knees . . .

In the 1980s, I was old enough to grouse about Kids These Days, but that was a pretty sunny decade except for media scares about nuclear holocaust and the ozone layer. Then came the 90s, when broadband access pulled us deep into the conspiracy weeds.

To my knowledge, though, nobody in the Alex-Jones fever swamp or the Greta-Thunberg eco-horror show predicted that a virus—mere scraps of DNA—would cut us off at the knees. Now I’m wondering if the collapse I always half expected has finally arrived. Time to head for the country, plant a garden, start sourcing a supply of meat from stock-raising neighbors?

Has dystopia finally come for us?

Probably not. And yet, there are some disquieting features about this crisis that I’ll have to work through in the next post.

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Mother’s Day: No Laughing Matter

I realized something for the first time when my kids were of an age for sleepovers and birthday parties: dads are funnier than moms.

I might have noticed it in my own house if it wasn’t right under my nose.  My husband was the one to get on the floor and wrestle, start sock fights, and make jokes when it was time to get serious.  That’s not to say I could never be found on the floor with kids crawling all over me, but there’s something different about mommy wrestling as opposed daddy wrestling–a certain lack of abandon and goofiness.  My daughter would come home from a party or church event with stories about how Cheri’s dad had made them laugh while driving them to the skating rink, or how Leslie’s dad had played a stupid trick that backfired.  It was never the moms.  Mothers could certainly be fun (I’d like to think I was. Maybe. Sometimes.), but seldom funny.

Several years ago, the late comedian Jerry Lewis made a controversial statement when asked about his favorite female comics .  His answer: None, because women aren’t funny. That raised a stink among women, many of whom seriously protested that they were funny—which kind of proved his point, in a way.  I would say that women aren’t funny in the same way.  They can be witty (as my mother was), clever, sharp, catty, artless, or charming, but there’s a reason male standup comics far outnumber females, and it doesn’t have much if anything to do with discrimination.  Of those few successful female comedians (as opposed to comic actors), most of them are known for the mordant kind of humor: the biting, even bitter kind.  It’s because women, more than men, have a tragic view of life.  And that’s because of one thing: women have babies.

I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain shall you bring forth children. (Genesis 3:16)

The Pain

Of course, there are mothers . . .

The most common and obvious interpretation of this verse limits the pain to labor and delivery.  But the pain of bearing a child lasts a lifetime, and it’s a particular pain that fathers do not share.  We’re not supposed to mention it these days, but the peculiar pain of motherhood owes to some essential differences between moms and dads:

  • Fatherhood is by choice; motherhood by necessity.
  • Fatherhood is dogmatic; motherhood is organic.
  • Fatherhood is straightforward; motherhood is serpentine and multi-faceted.
  • Fatherhood is tangential; motherhood is central.
  • Fathers are distinct; mothers are intimate.

At the back of a mother’s mind lurks a gigantic fear that something could happen to her baby, even if her baby is 45 years old.  The world yawns wide for our children: busy streets and nefarious strangers, fast cars and bad company, drunk drivers, sexual predators, drug dealers, gang leaders.  A good father will experience these same fears, but probably not until there’s some pretext for them (no what-if speculations for Dad), and not in the same gut-wrenching way if they occur. 

. . . and there are mothers.

Also, from the day our babies are born we have to start letting go of them, and sometimes it’s hard to know when. And how.  It isn’t just a matter of teaching them to crawl, walk, run, and drive; it’s teaching ourselves to stop identifying with them.  They were us; how can they stop being us?  When does their behavior stop being our responsibility?  When do their choices no longer reflect on our child-raising skills?

The Gain

And yet, a great irony: The more a mother clings to her child, the smaller motherhood becomes.  The true joy of mothering increases with every step your child takes away from you.  Conceiving, carrying, bearing, and delivering a baby into this world is the beginning of the pain, but also of the gain: a mature human being with his or her own personality, gifts, and vision.  That’s the goal, and I challenge anyone to name me a better one.  No six-figure income or tabloid-worthy career even comes close.  Motherhood is a double investment in life: the opportunity to grow up again by experiencing its primary discoveries through the eyes of a child and the understanding of a grownup, and the chance to pay it forward with a human being who will make the world a slightly better place. 

If your grown child causes you more grief than joy (and a lot of them do), first check your expectations to make sure you’re not looking for Mini-me: someone who thinks and acts as you do and agrees with 95% of your political and theological positions.  (If you actually ended up with a kid like that, you’re either very exceptional or your son or daughter got swapped for a robot somewhere down the line.)

But say your expectations were reasonable and your child-raising skills were at least adequate.  What went wrong?  Maybe nothing; maybe it’s time to let disappointing children become themselves, and answer for themselves. Trust God with them.  They are still human beings with immortal souls.  Yours will always be the first warm touch they felt, the first loving voice they heard. You pushed them out and raised them up—this is the great human enterprise, and mothers are right in the middle of it.

That’s not funny.  But it’s phenomenal.

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Ours to Build

The Parable of the Talents in Matthew is the Parable of the Minas in Luke, and it’s worth noting some important differences. A talent is worth more than $1000; a mina was equivalent to about three month’s wages–still a significant sum, but not in the high-roller league. Both Matthew and Luke place this parable during the week of the crucifixion, meaning it was one of the last Jesus ever told. Luke explains why he told it: because “the people thought that the kingdom of God was going to appear at once.”

Luke also adds this context: the master in the story was going away to receive a kingdom. And his would-be subjects had already rejected him by sending a delegation ahead to complain, “We do not want this man to be our king.” So the servants are entrusted with a not-inconsiderable sum of money to invest in a society that’s already hostile to them.

Matthew’s use of talents may signify the incalculable value of what we’re given to invest; Luke’s mention of minas could suggest our human limits of time and resources. Both apply, but we should also consider the expectant audience listening to this now-familiar story for the first time. They thought the kingdom was going to appear.

No, he’s telling them; the kingdom must be built.

I will build my church. And my church will build the kingdom. Not on her own, not without my name or the Holy Spirit’s power or the Father’s providence.

But the kingdom is ours to build.

I will build my church. And my church will built the kingdom.

I forget that. I think of Jesus coming with his angels to judge the living and the dead and to me that’s the kingdom. It will APPEAR at the sound of a trumpet. Now, with the world in such disarray, would be a great time! But Jesus’ coming is when the kingdom will be made visible and apparent; it’s being built right now. My business, every day, is kingdom business.

That business is easy to lose track of because it has so many facets: making a living, raising a family, performing acts of charity, serving a local church–all in a culture that continually proclaims, “We do not want this man to be our king.” That’s always been the case, in churchy, straightlaced times as well as in degenerate time. The world does not want Christ as king, has never wanted Christ as king, and will never want Christ as king.

So we build his kingdom. I don’t know why he does it this way, why he doesn’t just bring it. Bring it! may be what we mean when we say, “Come, Lord Jesus.” But he’s not going to bring it, he’s going to wrap it up as a gift to present to his Father. Or, to switch metaphors, he’s coming to place a bridal crown on her head and take her hand to lead her to the wedding feast. By then the kingdom will be built, the rightful king restored, the rebellious subjects subjugated. (For don’t forget the conclusion of the story: “But those enemies of mind, who did not want me as king . . .”)

What’s my part? Where do I build? My little section of this magnificent project seems small and insignificant, but his eyes are on it, and a cloud of witnesses are cheering me on.

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Divesting

“Divest, transitive verb: 1) To strip, as of clothes. 2a) To deprive, as of rights or property; b) to be free of. 3) To sell off or otherwise dispose of.”

The word leans both positive and negative.  To strip, or to deprive: that’s harsh.  To be free of—oh joy!

If we’re blessed enough to live into old age, it’s time to strip.  And be free.

There’s a book called Material World: a Global Family Portrait.  The author/photographer went around the

Getting by in Tokyo

world persuading families to empty their houses of all durable goods: appliances, dishes, books, clothing, furniture.  The Ukita family stack their possessions as compactly as their tidy apartment along the sidewalk in front of their building.  The Natromos of Mali—nine kids and three adults—smile from their rooftop surrounded by earthenware pots and utensils.  Most of their clothes are on their backs.  In northern California, the property of Regan Ronayune and Craig Cavin and their two kids sprawls across their suburban lawn: tools, toys, and toddler ware, necessities and luxuries tumbled together.

Every American house is like a little American frontier: empty space to be filled.*  We tend to fill up the space we have, and then some—observe the boom in separate storage units.

What matters in Iceland

Periodic moves help to clear away some of the underbrush.  My husband and I moved 23 times in our first 25 years.  For our early moves we got all our stuff in a pickup truck and a VW bug.  For our last move, we required one-third of a cross-country Bekins trailer.  At every stop on the way to our current location we filled up more space.

As for our current location, we’ve been here twenty years—long enough for the tide of our lives to turn.  What that means is, it’s time to divest.

Reason one:  Stuff persists.  As the years pass, a kind of stratus-layer buildup takes place.  The file cabinets and understair storage areas and those closet shelves that aren’t easy to reach harden like anonymous stone.  What’s in there?  I don’t even know anymore.  Maybe detritus from my mother’s estate, or mother-in-law’s, squirreled away before I could figure out what to do with it.  Like bad cholesterol in the bloodstream it’s not going away and will make itself known at some inconvenient time.

Reason Two: My kids don’t want our stuff.  The inconvenient time may be when I croak, or take a serious turn for the worse, like a debilitating stroke.  That’s when my children, who now have lives and families of their own, get the unwelcome responsibility of divestment dropped in their laps.  In the old days, family possessions were handed down through two or three generations.  Daughters may actually have wanted a grandmother’s silver, but now—who uses silver? or much less, china?  Not only is cheap merchandise readily available, but tastes have broadened.  Don’t assume your kids want your four-poster or steamer trunk.  Ask if they do.  If the response is less than enthusiastic, dump it.  Let them miss you for your thoughtfulness and personality, not for the job you saddled them with.

Reason Three:  The direction is toward less, not more.  Tiny houses may be a short-lived fad (easier to

Content in Mali

admire than to actually live in), but the culture is scaling down, for reasons not entirely good.  (It’s fine to want to get by with less stuff; not so fine to get by with fewer babies).  For now, though, that’s the trend: digital vs. material, disposable vs. durable, temporary vs. permanent.

Reason Four: Freedom.  Old age is the time to go deep rather than wide.  To spend down portfolios and build relationships.  To men what’s broken and appreciate what isn’t.  To number the days and spend them wisely.  Possessions become a burden the minute you no longer need them, or when your arthritic hands can’t wrangle the scissors or your fumbling brain can’t remember how to use the tools.  I’m not that old yet, but it’s time to start loosening my grip, singer by finger.  Soon enough I’ll have to let go.

Divest.  Do it while you’re still able.  Then enjoy your freedom.

 

*Meaning no disrespect to Native Americans; I know they were here first.  But they didn’t fill up the place.

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Thanks to Sarah

Sarah Josepha Hale—who remembers her?  Actually, we all do, indirectly, for two reasons.  One is our annual Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November.  The second I’ll get to later.

Even without Thanksgiving, she left her mark on American history, largely by having the sense to look around her, take stock of what she had, and be grateful for it.  In time she gave hundreds of American women reason to be grateful too.

A girl growing up in the early days of the 19th century didn’t have too many options, even in forward-looking, erudite New England.  A smattering of education, if she was lucky.  A considerate husband, if luckier still.  Healthy children who lived past their infancy—jackpot.  Though Sarah later wrote little about her father, she credited her mother with a strong mind and her Dartmouth-educated older brother with sharing some of his instruction.  The rest of her education was the Bible and classical English authors, the base from which she started her own school for ladies in Newport, New Hampshire.  A smattering of education? Check.

By all accounts, she scored well in the considerate husband department too.  David Hale, a moderately successful lawyer, shared books with her and encouraged her to write for the local paper.  In between babies, of course.  So she was doing well with intellectual stimulation, spouse, and progeny—until her husband suddenly died, “as with a stroke,” mere days before the birth of their fifth child.

A widow’s options in 1822 were even narrower than a young girl’s.  But if Sarah Hale had no funds she did have connections, and after a failed business or two she accepted the offer of an Episcopal clergyman to help start a women’s journal.  The Ladies’ Magazine, published in Boston, had its ups and downs, but caught the attention Louis A. Godey, a Philadelphia publisher who was looking to mine the untapped reserves of the women’s market.  He asked Mrs. Hale to come on board for a new venture, to be titled Godey’s Lady’s Book and American Ladies’ Magazine.  The cumbersome second phrase was soon dropped, and Godey’s Lady’s Book became the voice of American women for the next fifty years.

Sarah had two conditions: first, rather than borrow (or steal) material from other journals, especially overseas, she wanted to develop the talents of American writers by publishing and paying them well.  Second, she didn’t like fripperies or “high fashion”; her journal should be as high-minded as the editor.  Mr. Godey was fine with paying extra for good writing, but his business sense checked her puritan tendencies.  Women were interested in fashion, had always been interested in fashion, and always would be interested in fashion.  Hence, the painstakingly hand-colored “fashion plates” that decorated each number of Godey’s.  Sarah may have fumed, but got in her own licks by fulminating against tight corsets and encouraging women to pursue fresh air and exercise.

As the first successful women’s magazine ever, Godey’s Ladies’ Book used its popularity to do good while doing well—for instance, offering the first retail shopping service.  Every issue featured items women could purchase to be delivered directly to them, prefiguring the mail-order catalogue, which in turn prefigured Amazon.com.  While making money for the business, Sarah Hale used her influence to lobby for educational opportunities for women, including college, business schools, and normal schools (for training teachers).

She was very canny in the way she went about it, though: rather than castigating men for holding the fair sex back, she played to their interests: wouldn’t a husband come to appreciate a wife informed enough to share his business concerns?  Don’t all fathers want their children to benefit from an educated mother? And if a woman chooses not to marry, it’s silly to think she will squeeze men out of their chosen professions.  Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American woman to achieve a medical degree, owed much of her support to Sarah Hale, as did the Female Medical School of Philadelphia and the Ladies’ Medical Missionary Society.

She always said—and sincerely believed—that a woman’s chief place was in the home, but she saw that place as a noble calling rather than thankless drudgery.  She was, it’s fair to say, the Oprah of her day.  Who can tell how many women felt lifted up and encouraged by the earnest editor of their favorite magazine?

That’s probably Sarah Hale’s greatest legacy, in spite of her many good works and institutions she helped establish.  Still, she’s best known for is promoting Thanksgiving as a national holiday.  She persisted through three decades and five presidents until Abraham Lincoln, who may have had fewer reasons to feel thankful than most, wrote out a proclamation establishing the day we’ve celebrated in November ever since.

Two picture books about Sarah Hale have been published in the last decade: Sarah Gives Thanks, by Mike Allegra, and Thank You, Sarah by Laurie Halse Anderson.  The titles might give you a hint of the approach: the first presents a hard-working, determined woman growing old gracefully surrounded by her family.  The second makes Sarah’s crusading spirit the focus: a feminist icon charging the bulwarks of masculine privilege.  Just a guess, but I think the former description is more likely.  Sarah Hale’s activism, if that’s the word, was quiet, firm, and tenacious.  She worked with what she had and probably accomplished more actual good for women than other feminist firebrands.

Oh, and her other legacy: “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

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The “Nothingness” of Idolatry

A deep dive into the etymology (history and development) of the word idol:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Greek eido’lon (Latin idolon) encompassed the notion of

Baal – Israel’s nemesis. For centuries. What did they see in him?

image in many forms: phantom, idea, fancy, likeness.  The Septuagint (Greek translation of the Old Testament, completed around 250 B. C.) appropriated the Greek word to refer to a carved representation, and that’s the usual sense in Hebrew.  But the Hebrew word saw’, occasionally translated idol, means a falsehood, a vain thing, a “nothing.” An idol is, in the contemptuous Hebrew sense, “nothing,” and prophets like Isaiah had a lot of fun with the idea: cutting down a tree to carve it, cooking your food over the scraps, then bowing down to it (see Is. 44:12-17).

But an idolatrous “nothing” doesn’t seem like nothing to an idolater, and that’s the danger of it.

One intriguing use of the Greek applies the word to a reflection in water or a mirror.  Other classical uses include an effigy, a counterfeit, an imitation, an insubstantial appearance (such as a shadow), a mental fiction or fantasy, a false conception.  The wisdom of etymology subtly unfolds—who would have guessed this many shades of meaning for a word usually associated with crude images made from wood, metal, or stone?

Take “reflection.”  Aside from the myth that gives “narcissism” its name, this form of idolatry is a cartoon image, the smitten individual gazing at himself in a mirror while surrounded by fluttering hearts.  We’re too sophisticated for that, or almost.  I’m old enough to remember a video that made the rounds during the 2004 election: John Edwards, the Democrat candidate for V-P, taking 14 minutes to comb his hair in front of a mirror just before his one televised debate.  (To be fair, he possessed exceptional hair.)

Most of us don’t fall in love with our reflections.  But we do project, and the things we love become part of us, and when we pursue them, we pursue that which feeds, builds, expands, and often flatters us.  It’s possible to fall in love objectively—that is, for the object itself.  An aspiring ballerina loves dance for its own sake, as an athlete loves the game, a reader loves literature, a hiker loves mountains.  But in time the temptation to identify with the object of our affection can overtake us.  We no longer pursue out of love, but out of pride, possessiveness, or position.  Get two or more enthusiasts together and clock how long before arguments break out.  The more vehemence, the greater the personal investment.

When does enthusiasm become idolatry?  That’s hard to say.  When life makes no sense without it, when it brings pain—even when it dries up, suddenly and completely, because it couldn’t sustain your passion forever.

Idolatry is tricky, twisty, and deceptive.  And ultimately, an illusion—a “nothing” after all.  The only sure remedy is Reality Himself.

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Establish the Work of Our Hands

Here’s a newsflash from the world of medicine.

A Professor of surgery at London’s Imperial College, with the delightful name of Roger Kneebone, reports that he’s concerned about the increase in surgical students who lack certain vital skills.  Can you guess which ones?  Not diagnostic acumen or imaging analysis—many of these students ace their exams and blaze through their diagnostic computer programs.

But they don’t know how to sew.  And they aren’t too proficient in cutting, either—which, if you need to have your appendix out and patched up again, might be a skill you’d want your surgeon to have.

How does a bright young person get through medical school, all the way to the surgical theater, without learning how to stitch up a kitchen wound or dog bite?  How did she even get through kindergarten without learning how to cut along a straight line?*

We see a similar decline in the States, too: even kids who aren’t aiming at brain surgery for a career find themselves stymied when it comes to doing laundry or even folding clean clothes.

Cooking?  They can probably manage the microwave, but can they turn on an oven?

Changing the oil every 2000 miles?  Forget it.  In fact, they often do.

Yes, I’m pushing 70, so I’ve earned the right to rag on kids these days, just as my father used to rag on me for my taste in music and my mother for the way I wore my hair.  But this looming scandal in the medical field, like the shortage of skilled craftsmen here in the U.S., is more than a cultural trend.  It’s a symptom—one of many symptoms—of a shift in thinking that grew up with digital technology.  It’s the idea that we don’t really need our hands any more.  Just our fingers.  Manual labor is a thing of the past, meaning manual skills are no longer necessary.  Musicians, dancers, sculptors, and painters may follow their dream through the arts, but those who are not gifted in those pursuits can sit back and be entertained with a swipe of the screen.

This is a deeply gnostic belief, and it ties in with other popular contemporary illusions like transgenderism.  It’s why some school districts have eliminated shop and home ec classes, pared art, music, and drama programs and cut back on recess time.  We live in our heads, and “knowledge” is the only thing that matters. The future (supposedly) belongs to “knowledge workers,” not electricians and carpenters.

But no one lives in a virtual world, as much as some misfits and sociopaths may think they do.  There’s no real disconnect between brains, hands, feet, and that incorporeal being otherwise known as Soul.  God made us to be integrated beings, hand and mind working together.  What he has joined, no man can pull asunder without great damage to both.

To work in this way is a tremendous honor, because in doing so we imitate Creator.  God may not have “hands,” as we understand them, but he is so active in the world–making, unmaking, and recreating–that Bible writers can’t help but speak of “the hand of the Lord.” Even in an act as basic as turning over a row in the garden and planting seed, we follow in his metaphorical footsteps.  Angels, so far as we know, don’t make anything, or certainly no material thing.  That privilege belongs to us.

So put down the phone or tablet (as soon as you finish reading this!) and go make something.  Take a pottery class. Draw a tree.  Build a birdhouse, or paint one.   If nothing else, figure out how to thread a needle and sew on a button.  Apply the workings of your mind to the skill of your hands, then teach someone else to do the same.  Ask the Lord to establish the work of your hands (Ps. 90:17), and rejoice in following his creative, productive ways.

*In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis wrote of his own lack of ability to cut with scissors.  It was a strange disconnect between his very acute intellect and the parts of the brain that controlled small motor activity.  As a child, many a project begun hopefully had to be abandoned with tears.  He never learned to drive or do math, either, which suggests an interesting connection between manual dexterity and figures.  The Canadian writer Robertson Davies was the same way.